Ubuntu Broke so Now I Use Windows

This season has not been a happy one for advocates, I’m seeing a marked increase in Ubuntu rejections from non-technical users. Problems range from random crashes, freezing, graphics problems, too slow and usb devices becoming corrupt.

It’s not so bad when people move away from Ubuntu and move to Fedora or Debian, but it breaks my heart when people move to Windows XP or 7. Hey they gave Ubuntu a go right? But we couldn’t keep them.

Is anyone else doing more fire-fighting with instability issues in Ubuntu? I know all of my computers have issues with Ubuntu, unresolved, although I can cope or fix them as they come up. Not something everyone can do. It worries me because Ubuntu was our fresh brand, to try and get out there and if we bugger it up we’ll have to make a whole new brand to get away from bad experiences people have had.

Well …
I sort of agree. Since the last update, and I think a kernel update was there, I have noticed my system a little more slow, and the CPU is starting to hit 100%, not continiously, but it’s there.
I have been using Ubuntu since version 9.x, but when they introduced the new GNOME shell, I switched to Fedora, but only for a month or so, so many bugs, and it’s not as flexible as Ubuntu. But yes, you are right, I think Ubuntu has to lean more towards stability and not cutting edge features, users want a consistent and worry free approach, but when you introduce cutting edge features, it can take some stability away if not tested. Just my thoughts.

(Sorry for the long comment, perhaps longer than your post 🙂 )
I’ve been using Linux for about 8 years now, and even though I use it exclusively at home and work, I know there always have been issues, bugs, devices which don’t work, problems with the distinct desktop environments not being well supported (Does this clicks? http://askubuntu.com/questions/60771/are-there-any-plans-to-add-paid-software-support-to-kubuntus-muon-software-cente ).
Linux fans just figure out the answer and move on. Others will just blame “this damn Linux thing” for anything that happens (even when it’s not Linux’s fault, like broken hardware) and run back to “home” (windows).
I think Linux is capable of raising it’s userbase.
But unfortunately, I think Canonical is in the wrong path with Unity. I also think it was with Gnome.
For me KDE has always been much better in all aspects (well, forgetting 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 of course 😉 ).
But this is also something which will always handicap Linux: Microsoft puts all it’s efforts in Windows. Apple puts all it’s efforts on Mac. In Linux… this is a mess!
If we had all effort in Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandriva and so much others, plus the upstream projects (KDE, Gnome, etc) focused, Linux would take over the world in no time. But that’s utopic, of course…
That’s the Linux curse: even with a very small userbase, it’s still incredibly fragmented over distros, desktop environments, etc.

After the switch to Unity things became bad in oh so many ways. I’m not against Unity because it is Something Else Than Gnome (TM) but because where Gnome was stable and Just Worked, Unity does not.

With 11.04 I tried Unity but soon gave up. Switched back to Gnome and things were better, although not what I have come to expect from “the ubuntu experience”. Perhaps the switch to Unity has drawn too much attention away from maintaining a stable UI?

I’m using Kubuntu 11.10 on four systems here. No real serious issues that I’ve seen. Are there minor issues? Of course. Are any operating systems without issues? Not that I’ve found. I moved to Linux about 8 years ago, using several different distros, as I spent much of my time reinstalling Windows XP about every three months…on one machine or another. So, for me, Linux has been less of a problem than Windows.

While I do not support more than one or two Ubuntu computers at a time, I’ve not had all this ‘problems’.
I will say that I too am looking away from Ubuntu directly. The decisions made with the 11.04 & 11.10 distro’s are not conducive to accomplishing my work . I am becoming more and more dissatisfied with the decisions made by Canonical. Decisions without alternative… i.e.
11.04: wanted to install OpenOffice, using USC it gave me LibreOffice!!
If I wanted Libre I would have installed it (nothing personally against Libre, I’ve been using OpenOffice for years). And of course this UNITY thing.
“Hey Canonical, I thought using Linux was all about the choices WE want as users. Not what YOU or some monolithic corporation wants us to use.”

So having virtualbox running and having your desktop crash means you potentially just lost data in 2 or more OSes. I *have* to be able to work ($$$). And I couldn’t stomach Windows, at least Mac has Unix under the hood.

My $.02 – take some of the energy away from things like Unity development and get folks to work on the ‘boring’ issues like the one above. Nuts and bolts that make machines run or crash. Kind of important.

I’ve stopped recommending people switch Linux in general due to the Unity switch, it is just too unstable and it’s usability is worse than Gnome 2.x. Unfortunately I haven’t decided what I want to recommend now (I used to recommend Ubuntu proper)

I’m currently running a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu myself, but am looking at Linux Mint as well, Lubuntu also is something I am considering.

I’ve used Ubuntu for nearly 6 years in an on-again, off-again sort of way. I dedicated nearly 3 years to running it exclusively for myself in a Windows/Mac mixed environment.

The game shifter for me came earlier this year when we took on new (educational) programs in the (physical) community, and I had to start interacting with (a ton of) school districts and individuals outside our org. Formats and Battery life really killed it for me. I could not, in any reasonably consistent way, get file formats correct using Open Office and Libre Office. It does not work well when exchanging docs back and forth – nor does Google Docs (when other users are on Office 20XX). Not only that, Battery life was not good, and I was on the road a lot. All the agressive battery tactics could not get me the life I was getting out of Windows on my Dell Latitude E6510.

I switched to a Macbook Pro – after looking at options from Lenovo, even System 76. I am not overly enthused to use a Mac again (I’ve used them for years). But, I need to use the best tool for the job, and right now, my job consists of a ton of MS Office based Documents. That, and because of my choice of small program – I do get 7-9 hours of battery life on a charge.

Fast forward to the fact that I’ve always got a Ubuntu Machine in my office, and follow the community as best I can. I recently purchased 30 netbooks for out tutoring program, installed Ubuntu and cloned, locked them down for kids in a way that is not possible in Windows 7 Starter edition (because I don’t need a whole OS since it’s a netbook, right?). Everything was great until we had to run a Flash-Intensive web-based program. This program stutters in Ubuntu using Google Chrome – both because of wireless drivers and perfomance of full-screen flash and compiz.

I hope to have the opportunity later this year to actually get Ubuntu running (great) on these machines. I am saddened, however, that as I write this I am cloning these machines back to Win7 Starter with as much modification and lockdown as possible (which isn’t much, believe me).

Sorry for the length, but your post comes at a very sad time for this small-time IT Director.

On my primary workstation at home, where I’ve been running Ubuntu since 8.04, I now use Windows 7 primarily. The reason is that 11.04 randomly hangs, completely and utterly. On the flip-side, I rely on Ubuntu 10.10 on my work laptop.

Whatever instability came in with Ubuntu 11.04 prevented me from using it on a daily basis and so I have no choice but to rely on Windows 7. I will definitely be giving Ubuntu 11.10 a go, but can only adopt it if it’s stable.

I’ve been using Ubuntu since 9.04 (Netbook Edition), and only had a problem with it once. GRUB kind of tanked on me shortly after the install or 9.04, and I had to reinstall the OS from scratch (not that big a deal, really). But, it’s been rock solid since. Heck, I’ve had to replace the hardware sooner than the OS. I’m still running on a netbook with 11.04, and I’m lovin’ it. Looking forward to 11.10 when Unity really sings!

I think I understand where Canonical want to go with Unity, but I’m not convinced it’s the right direction. Even if is the right direction, Unity on 11.04 was half-implemented and unusable, whilst also killing performance (e.g. EeePC900 can’t play video smoothly with 11.04, but could before).

On the plus side this provided the kick I needed to take a look at Xmonad, which has been positive overall. Unfortunately it’s not simple to get a nicely configured system; I still haven’t got a 11.04 system I can say I’m happy with – I haven’t the time or patience to fiddle around with it anymore.

@Brad – OpenOffice doesn’t exist any more, not in any sensible way. It would be improper for Canonical (and the community) to continue to offer it directly. There is some branding issues between LibreOffice and OpenOffice, but if you’ve been using OpenOffice on ubuntu then you’ve been using LibreOffice this entire time.

@Tom – I don’t believe it would be prudent to support Microsoft Office with wine, the drain on resources for trying to work with or cope with Microsoft Office has killed bigger companies. The money and time is better spend on LibreOffice and working out how to replace Microsoft Office on windows for all users.

@Anthony – I’m currently doing a similar project with really old laptops, think 256 Mb of ram. Flash works great on Lubuntu with Firefox. Chrome is just not very good with Flash, and by all means just get rid of Compiz.

I actually had no problem with the original Ubuntu parts so far, except for the installation of 11.04, which drove me mad since my laptop has no DVD and therefore the installer kept crashing without a hint to the problem…
I also had no friends leaving Ubuntu, because non of them use it. The reason for this is the same since years: MS Office. That’s it. Nothing else.

I myself have become a bit bitter however about nearly every piece of software that I use: I began to hate emacs for making it so hard to use with the rest of gnome/ubuntu and for having those extreme startup times, latex for being such a badly designed language (or better: not designed at all), evince and inkscape for being unbearable slow, banshee for not playing music videos as music and therefore keeping me from having a real music collection (e.g. when I search for an artist, I only get the music, not the music video…), shotwell for not having a ‘back’ button and not supporting any kind of ‘copy’ operation except for dragging onto the desktop (why I should need a photo managing application without a way to get the photos out is beyond me…).
And don’t get me started on The Gimp. Did you see the splash screen for 2.7? An animal bondage porn splash screen? How am I supposed to advocate this for work? Really sad.

I’m not going to change to Windows or Mac but I’m really frustrated with free software at the moment.
So it’s really not Ubuntu.

I help a lot of novices – friends, others – I install Ubuntu dual bot for them, and – I continue to support them as a friend. But I do not support Windows. If Ubuntu has issues I deal with them. None of these people installed Windows themselves, and the hardware was, anyway, made for Windows of course. All these novice users prefer Ubuntu and it is obvious their machines run faster better, safer, with Ubuntu. No contest. But they did not buy their machines with Ubuntu pre installed. The elephant in the room is a retail monopoly.

I have been a long time Ubuntu user. My most recent machine is a 24″ iMac I bought in 2008, and installed Ubuntu on the day I got it. But I have a requirement recently of using headphones instead of the built-in speakers. In OS X or Windows, if I plug in a set of headphones, the speakers mute and the sound is redirected to the headphone port. I can’t seem to make that work in Ubuntu, even playing around in alsamixer I can’t get any sound out of a set of headphones or mute the speakers. So I had to install OS X to be able to use the computer at night while roommates are asleep, with the headphones. Really sucks, I’m hoping this is fixable in 11.10…

To top it off, I bought an HP Color LaserJet printer that specifically worked in Linux. But found out after having to install OS X that it doesn’t work in OS X. Not sure how that’s even possible, I thought Ubuntu and OS X both used cups?

1) USB flashdrive gets a speed downgrade when copying big files – often the Nautilus progress bar zooms close to 100% and then hangs, locking the GUI until either completion or failure. Fedora Gnome 3 locks too, just like Ubuntu.

2) Root partition reset to Readonly during some unknown disk access operation (no logs because, of course, no write access). The wireless is strangely disabled after a reboot.

3) Some USB flashdrives just do not work for anything other than small files, especially the fake CD devices like Sandisk. The same devices work faultlessly with Mac and ‘Doze.

I use Ubuntu 10.04.xLTS 32-bit Desktop and will only migrate away from it when someone ports gnome2 (unity, gnome3, Window’s 8 “Metro” UI) all contribute to the dumbing down of the UI and limit code and user alike. ( I also use Debian and CentOS, but not Windows)

In regards to Ubuntu, Non-LTSes are betas for the next LTS; and the LTSes don’t really get fixed until version point 3 or 4. Ubuntu is in a constant state of instability, although the LTSes are much more stable than the Non-LTSes are. If people want to run unstable distros, cool Use Arch or something of that nature, but Ubuntu is far from the stability of Debian.

Ubuntu LTS pulls from debian-testing and the Non-LTSes pull from debian-unstable, and as such, so to do any forks built from Ubuntu. Debian uses debian-unstable > debian-testing > debian-stable and unlike Ubuntu, does not adhere to a forced release cycle with all-esle-be-damned-it-will-get-out-on-time.

I have witnessed a little of this, but not from new users. I am seeing more and more developers moving away from not only Ubuntu, but Linux in general. I kind of burned out a year or so ago from all of this community stuff, but I continued to stay a part of it one way or the other. I know in the past year, I changed my tactics. Actually, they changed without me knowing, but it wasn’t until the other day where I realized it was actually working.

I don’t do the whole, “You have to try Linux/Ubuntu, it is better, blah blah blah.” I tell people what I use, let them know it isn’t for everyone at first, but it kind of grows on you. I tell the person I could care less what you are using, if Windows or OS X is for you, then rock on. I don’t sit there and tell them how to use Linux/Ubuntu, and I tell them if you decide to check it out, mess with it, Google your issues. Really, what I am saying is, “Don’t bother me with your issues.”

It is weird, I kind of stopped caring really, and that has worked better than the preaching days. At a local bike race this past weekend, I had people coming up to me saying, “Hey, I am trying out Ubuntu and I am really liking it.” I wonder if there is a new term for “I don’t give a shit marketing” 😀

I had started down the road of Openbox and Minimal Ubuntu using parts of LXDE. While I have used this before on older systems, it kind of broke my heart to use a 2011 netbook and have such a basic GUI.

Compiz was being used to handle Window rules – so that kids couldn’t close the browser, keeping it always maximized, etc. Without that, the configuration was not reliable.

I actually had our staff begging me to switch the Ubuntu based netbooks back to Google Chrome, the Flash performance really stuttered in the latest Firefox on Ubuntu (just our testing, obviously not the general consensus).

Again, I really hope that during some downtime I can get a better working distro rolled for our use. Win7 sucks, but what can I say when Flash and Wireless give me *slightly better performance – that’s all our staff and the kids care about…

@Nick – They use cups (services) but not the same drivers. Ubuntu uses guttenprint and hplip, apple uses whatever the manufacturer provides. You should find settings for your audio device in the Audio settings in System > Preferences > Sound. Try a LiveCD if you can to test this theory.

I lost both my girlfriend and family. My parents and girlfriend were both pretty happily using 10.04. Then upgrade time came. 10.10 ran on nothing. My parent’s old graphics card was now unsupported so they lost all the compiz goodness of buffered and wobbly windows. My girlfriend got a new laptop and I tried 10.10 on it and it just didn’t work. I upgraded to 10.10 on my netbook and unity failed to work. I downgraded to 10.04 netbook edition which was and still is fine (I learned from that mistake and am *still* using 10.04 netbook edition on my netbook). My girlfriend went back to windows. My family got a new computer in the spring of 2011 so I tried again with 11.04 with them but unity was so utterly crashy and wouldn’t run for more than minutes that I had to try switching to Fedora and Gnome shell. That’s a bit better but also hobbled and full of usability regressions and both are a whole new interface to learn so now my parents are mostly using windows again.

As for me? 10.04 on my laptop and netbook and the entire linux team of my [web programming] company also uses 10.04.

I got a new nettop and tried the 11.10 beta. It’s the first version of ubuntu since 10.04 that doesn’t crash so often to be unusable. However I’m still not thrilled with the new interface and am going to at least give xfce+compiz a try (we INVENTED wobbly windows, imho one of the greatest windows features, windows just *feel* more tangible, and now we’ve got the two leading gnome desktops with no wobbly windows support 0_o?)

I am so so so sad at the state of “the linux desktop” right now. Ubuntu has burned most of the credibility it spent the last 5 years building up with the non technical community I know (and with that, my credibility too, my family and girlfriend won’t have much time for me now if I try proposing it again, they tried it, liked it, then it broke itself for no good reason forcing them back to windows)

And while I love linux and want to stay with it on my desktop, 10.04 is getting longer in the tooth and I’m looking for any distro that will offer a nice sane and stable and modern desktop.

Was using Ubuntu from time to time since Version 5, now I finally switched to a Mac and IOS devices. I deal with Linux serves all day at work, and I’m mostly happy with them. But when I’m at home after work, I don’t want to deal with any stuff. Fire it up – and it works. No big boxes anymore, just a mac mini, an iPhone and a iPad. This helps me to save a lot of energy, too.

I’ll keep looking after Ubuntu an other Desktop Distributions, because I really like Linux. For this time, I’ve chosen the commercial way. I had my reasons.

I’m running Ubuntu natty on a new touchscreen notebook computer I just purchased, and the experience has been downright terrible.

The first thing I noticed is that the touchscreen doesn’t work, and there is no jack detection for the audio (I hacked/patched both via shell script). If that isn’t enough, at one point the kernel would hang/crash at least once a day. There’s at least one driver issue there and also I would often run out of RAM because unity-panel-service leaked memory and started to hog over a gigabyte. Add to that the SD card slot not working (fixed via modprobe hack), and a race condition in Gnome that leaves the gnome theme unset at login (fixed via hack in system config).

I guess I can expect these kinds of things to happen on a brand-new computer. The real problem was when I started to report bugs in the hope that they will be fixed by Oneiric. I have tried reporting the touchscreen not working (ubuntu-bug told me that the development cycle was over and that I should use AskUbuntu instead), jack-sense not working (no response from launchpad), the kernel bugs (marked as confirmed, no other response), and a firewire-ohci error message (their mailing list actually did an amazing job of getting back to me, I think that’s why my SD slot now works).

Notice how all of those problems were fixed by tampering with system configuration or running shell scripts. If didn’t have any programming abilities, the system would be completely unreliable.

I’m no longer recommending Ubuntu either. I can’t guarantee things work or that they will understand the interface since unity is so badly designed (great for netbooks – crap for any serious work). I only recommend Linux mint and if they have a fast broadband – Linux mint debian because it continually upgrades.

P.s. If you look at google trends searches for Ubuntu is going down. My hunch is that Ubuntu is actually going to fail. Google is going to made the operating system redundant.

P.p.s By the way, we use Ubuntu at work for all our servers. We have about 20 of them and the numbers keep going up. They are very reliable but we only use LTS. Anyhow, I persuaded my boss to buy support for canonical to help support them. We had it for less than a year but notice two worrying things. 1 – they cut and pasted answers to problems from google and aren’t very sepcific

Martin, Thank You for taking the time to write this as most other Ubuntu Community members would not dare touch this subject for fear of being blacklisted somehow (unspoken of course).

Im an Ubuntu user since 6.10 and have converted MANY people and installed Ubuntu on approx 75 machines now. All major problems cropped up for me around 11.04 Natty release so I keep people on hold at 10.10. Interesting to read Ubuntu users here STILL have problems with Unity and Natty randomly freezing. Thats a major reason why after two months of using Natty I went back to 10.10 and quite happy.

I have been working with 11.10 since 1st beta and its extremely buggy still. Really is hard to grasp considering we are two weeks out from release. I think Ubuntu should consolidate, regroup and focus on usability and quality instead of cutting edge systems that are practically unusable. Ive had 5 people jump to Unity interface only to have all 5 go back to 10.10. For me Unity is a bomb. Why mouse over, wait a second or two for Unity to appear, then mouse and wait more for the workspace switcher to get to my workspaces? Why should I have to break my concentration and flow by leaving the mouse to do keyboard shortcuts? So much easier to have my workspaces nestled in 10.10 on the bottom panel and right there for me.

Ubuntu should really go to a one year cycle to work out kinks and make the OS something to be feared for its usability and stability. Many users still on 10.04 LTS and 10.10 (maybe natty too?) who cant even put an audio CD and have Rhythmbox or Banshee pull up the track data. A major bug that gets left by the wayside because focus is always on the next release coming up in short order.

I also agree with a previous post concerning all the various Ubuntu distros. So many things going on that work gets spread almost too thin on Ubuntu itself. Why not have Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, etc all wrapped into one DVD? Users pick at the beginning of install which they want, or if they have space, install all and be able to switch between them.

Just my 2 cents. I know nothing will change and people need to speak up more like you’ve done instead of just being a fanboy or spokesperson for a great OS that might have some buggy issues, in turn, pushing potential users away and making long time users look for other distros and operating systems.

hmm, haven’t noticed much problems on a wide range of machines, from netbooks and older laptops to spanking new machines. Two things, though:
– more attention needs to be paid to battery time on laptops. That’s not Ubuntu though, this has been a kernel regression.
– a simpler way to use it in bigger/centralized deployments. I install Ubuntu in offices, and a simpler way to do nss/ldap/remote mounted homedirs and all that jazz would be highly appreciated

Once upon a time I loved the bleeding edge. I would upgrade to the beta and sometimes late alpha version of the newest Ubuntu it was always fine. Occasionally something was a little glitchy but it was never much of a problem and things quickly smoothed out long before release. I loved new things and having such a stable beta OS spoke well of released Ubuntu’s stability too.

10.10 was where I noticed that go out the door. I waited late into the game and upgraded to a beta only a few weeks before release and it was utterly unusable with bugs. And the last two releases (10.10 and 11.04) have been released with big noticeable bugs and regressions all over the place. I don’t know what has changed in Ubuntu release engineering but it’s catastrophic.

Windows, Ubuntu, Mac OS X – they all cause trouble too often. Maybe it’s – once again – time to blame hardware vendors with their bad documentation, crazy software/firmware, not sticking to friggin specs, and whatnot.

Personal experience: after installing Ubuntu 11.04 on my Z68 based system with Intel HD Graphics 3000 (read: rather new), things just worked. Installing Windows 7 on the other hand, resulted in a boot to a black screen (Intel graphics driver at that time screwed things up).

Up until Ubuntu 10.10, I used to enjoy trying out the betas; they were usually pretty stable and bugs were fixed quickly. But with 10.10 and beyond, it has just been embarassing how poorly the betas work and how half-implemented the features are.

The 11.10 beta is just useless on my machine. Not only does it crash A LOT, but you can’t even change the damn fonts. What kind of downhill slide is that?

I recently switched to Linux Mint because Ubuntu just really started sucking on my 3.5 year old notebook. Before installing Mint though I downgraded to 10.04 and the difference in overall performance and responsiveness was palpable. Mint feels just as quick as 10.04 so I am using that now full time. Not really interested in Ubuntu anymore since Canoncial decided to make it crap.

i’m using windows now and it really breaks my heart after advocating linux since 2006 to my friends. I already gave up ubuntu and gnome in 2009 and migrated to kubuntu and KDE and back to windows. Only this time a legit windows. (hehehehe)

It doesn’t really work for me now for my personal and professional life.

I’m saying this is not the end for me and my open source advocacy. I’m using a proprietary operating system now but i’m still using open source programs. I’m stull sharing my experiences and push ubuntu or kubuntu to other people.

I am absolutely loving Ubuntu 11.04. I think it’s the best version yet, and that they are really on the right track with usability, style, and polish. As far as things not working, I have had more work with this than ever before. Just the other day, out of curiosity, I tried scanning a document from my Epson MFC Artican 835 and it worked wirelessly . I was shocked, and very pleased!

Also, the super key + type shortcuts make it really easy to navigate in Ubuntu 11.04.

I installed Ubuntu at several companies. Both as desktop and as server. However, there has been too many regressions the past years. The product is not stable. Even the LTS is not. Using Upstart was a very, very bad decision. LTS server still can’t boot when you have mdadm 1 with LVM snapshots. Use NFS? Bad choice for natty! Forget to unmount your shares and the kernel will panic on shutdown. I can go on for a while.

So I switched to FreeBSD and Debian where KVM is needed. Debian still has a dependable init daemon and FreeBSD is a nice surprise. Well documented, very stable and NFS is well supported. It even has a boot log! After all time invested in learning Ubuntu, it took a long time to reach the decision to switch. It was also painful. I still hope Ubuntu will reach stability one day. As long as some machines are not switched, I’ll keep reporting bugs.

However, I will no longer recommend Ubuntu to anyone and I’m still searching for a sane, stable and modern Linux desktop (preferably with KDE) to use in corporate environments.